Volume 31, Number 15 · October 11, 1984
Discovery
By Joan Didion
Finding the Center: Two Narratives
by V.S. Naipaul
Knopf, 176 pp., $13.95
Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement
by Graham Greene
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., $14.95
The amount of time writers spend measuring fire sites and hanging about with snotty-nosed urchins is an aspect of the literary life increasingly obscured. Writers themselves tend to be made uneasy by any suggestion of fieldwork, and to discourage the drawing of parallels between, say, their travel and their work; the direct connection carries the stigma of 'research,' of 'working something up,' and seems to imply not only a failure of the imagination but a certain mingy opportunism. Outside the life the process is misapprehended altogether: it is generally understood that writers 'write what they know,' or 'write from experience,' but this 'experience' is construed as discrete, finished, a fullblown narrative presenting itself to be typed. In this view the process takes place exclusively in the act of placing the words on the page: the writer has a 'past,' and he writes about it well or badly, the writer has a 'story,' and, with what may seem to the reader admirable directness or needless complication, he tells it.
Review, 2776 words
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